Lost Cause

I just read the excellent timeline from Snake Featherston called Up With the Star about a different ACW. It was going great until a Lost Cause guy showed up and did his best to derail the thread. Luckily the Lost Cause is not the generally accepted one for the ACW.
What if it was though? How would this affect Civil War scholarship in general? Howabout race relations in the US? The role of the federal government versus the state governments? I am not a Lost Cause proponent by any means, and I can't see this as being in any way good for the US.
 
How I hate the Lost Cause Myth

As a Texan of vaguely Southern background, the Lost Cause is something I find embarrassing and sorrowful when it crops up, as if it were an inherited disease.

The South way overestimated their military abilities and economic importance (both in the US and abroad). They hoped for quick victory, then hoping for the Brits and French to come in and break the Union blockade that trashed their export economy, and got pwned horribly.

IMNSHO the better guys for the long-term (Union) won the war and lost the peace letting the local aristocracy re-establish economic feudalism in the South with sharecropping, union-busting, and the like making life brutal, deprived misery for those not born rich, white, and well-connected.

Folks that bang on about how tyrannical Lincoln was (armed insurrection is supposed to be answered with hearts and flowers?) and how horrible the Union POW camps were (prisoner exchange was supposed to be a pretty quick deal, but the Union wanted its black troops back as well as white troops which queered the deal. That's why both Union and Southern POW camps became squalid nests of disease, malnutrition, and misery).
They rage at how Sherman's March to the Sea left a burned raped corpse of the Southern economy miss one vital thing- who fired on Ft. Sumter? It wasn't the Union.

The Southern planters and their enablers started it, wanted to keep their privileges, and have a nice gentlemanly war. The Union didn't oblige.

A lot of the Lost Cause folks imagine themselves as Rhett Butler or Scarlett O'Hara, not some sharecropper in debt til they die early and hard or a slave that's been whipped and starved, had their spouse and kids sold away from them.

The poor white freeholders in the Piedmont and Appalachia didn't give a tinker's fart about slavery's "benefits". They were just as liable to get harassed by the local law, have their land seized in corrupt tax/foreclosure auctions, and so forth as blacks.
That didn't mean their racial attitudes were enlightened, they just didn't have any stake in the plantation system and were lukewarm at best about the claims of the planters losing their privileges being some tragedy.
They saw how the Confederate draft was just as corrupt and slanted toward conscripting as many poor white men as possible as the Union's and letting the planters' sons stay home out of harm's way.
They saw how their families were reduced to even more grinding poverty with so many in arms. So, for a great swathe of Southerners aware of their history, there's no nostalgia for the Lost Cause whatsoever.

If the Confederacy won, you'd have a banana republic, economically stratified, intellectually stagnant, oppressive, and backward.
So excuse me if I find the Lost Cause folks infatuated with a toxic fantasy.
I love to war-game underdogs and find a way for them to win, but I have no illusions that a Confederate victory would make me or any other semi-reasonable person a happy panda.
 

Warsie

Banned
As a Texan of vaguely Southern background, the Lost Cause is something I find embarrassing and sorrowful when it crops up, as if it were an inherited disease.

LOL!!

how horrible the Union POW camps were (prisoner exchange was supposed to be a pretty quick deal, but the Union wanted its black troops back as well as white troops which queered the deal. That's why both Union and Southern POW camps became squalid nests of disease, malnutrition, and misery).

I thought the exchange stopped because the union saw their population advantage and wanted to stress the confederate states' resources badly

They rage at how Sherman's March to the Sea left a burned raped corpse of the Southern economy miss one vital thing- who fired on Ft. Sumter? It wasn't the Union.

Well shelling a military fort is a bit different than burning a country to the ground


A lot of the Lost Cause folks imagine themselves as Rhett Butler or Scarlett O'Hara, not some sharecropper in debt til they die early and hard or a slave that's been whipped and starved, had their spouse and kids sold away from them.

LOL. That is likely true, of course the kinds of people who wrote about about that WERE the rich white people who were still bitter over losing their war =P

And their descendants too

The poor white freeholders in the Piedmont and Appalachia didn't give a tinker's fart about slavery's "benefits". They were just as liable to get harassed by the local law, have their land seized in corrupt tax/foreclosure auctions, and so forth as blacks.

Didnt Appalachia end up fighting against the lowland confederate forces to the point of demolishing the railroad tracks in say Kentucky?

They saw how the Confederate draft was just as corrupt and slanted toward conscripting as many poor white men as possible as the Union's and letting the planters' sons stay home out of harm's way.

Wasnt a lot of the rich families voluntarily sending their sons to war due to the military culture of the south where many had families in officer schools and whatnot?

If the Confederacy won, you'd have a banana republic, economically stratified, intellectually stagnant, oppressive, and backward.

Yes, but it also makes it more likely for a mass black revolution like in Haiti. As time goes on Which I find awesome because of the well, Nat Turner-esque shit.
 
Gotta say, I agree with everything the above poster from Texas wrote, so that's that. The Lost Cause is stupid, and I do not agree with people who think the CSA could have made it as a country or that the South is some oppressed part of the US like a North American Gaza strip.

Anyway, if this wack view of history was adopted how would the US look today?
 
A few years back a salvage/archaeological operation pulled up the wreckage of a Confederate blockade runner that had sunk off the Carolinas in 1864. These ships ran finished goods from Europe, things they lacked the capacity to produce themselves. It the hold of this ship they found thousands of uniform coat buttons.

If the Confederacy was dependent on Europe for items that basic it just buttresses the argument that the worst this the North could have done to them is letting them be. The idea of the lost cause is little more than a version of the whole "stabbed in the back" mythology that springs up with disturbing frequency throughout history. "We could have won if only ________ had or hadn't happened".

The fact is that there are Neo-Confederate types out there, many of whom are in the halls of power, who would love nothing better than to refight the civil war. This idea is pure poison.
 
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